Hello Lunch Break. How was your holiday? Fourth of July always brings anticipation for me. Sun, fun, best fruit of the year 🍉 and the perfect long weekend that kind of makes you feel like time stopped. You're not thinking about what comes next. And then it's July 9th and someone on Instagram is already talking about pumpkin spice lattes, and you remember that it didn't. The "it feels like summer forever" feeling is exactly when your competitors are doing nothing. And, that’s your opening.
Alright. Clock's ticking. Back to work.
"Oh, I can't stop drinking the coffee. I stop drinking the coffee, I stop doing the standing and walking and the words putting-into-sentence doing." -Lorelai Gilmore
THE GAME CHANGED
Microsoft built the one AI visibility tool Google won't give you.
On June 16, Bing Webmaster Tools rolled out four new views inside its AI Performance dashboard: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare. Available to any site that's verified in Bing Webmaster Tools right now.
The one that matters most is Citation Share.
Here's what it does. When an AI-generated answer cites multiple sources for a query, Citation Share shows you what percentage of those citations belong to your site. Not a raw count of how many times you were cited. A relative share: you got 3 out of 10 citations for this query, so your Citation Share is 30%.
Google offers nothing like this for AI Overviews. ChatGPT and Perplexity offer nothing like this. Microsoft built the first official share-of-voice metric for AI citations.
Your homework: Go to bing.com/webmasters and verify your site if you haven't already. It takes about five minutes and a DNS record. Open the AI Performance dashboard and look for the Citation Share tab. Set your baseline today. The Compare view lets you overlay time periods, so six months from now you'll have actual before-and-after data on whether your content work is moving your AI citation share.
THE WINDOW IS NOW
Your Google Business Profile is about to get a new employee. You didn't hire them.
Search Engine Roundtable reported Google has been rolling out an AI-powered Messages feature on Business Profiles. When it's live on a profile, Google's AI agent can respond to customer chats on your behalf, drawing from what's on your profile: your hours, your listed services, your business description.
It hasn't reached all accounts yet. And, a quick review in Reddit, shows most feel a certain way about it.
Source: Reddit
The issue I see is what the AI has to work with. Wrong hours, an outdated service list or a description you wrote when you first set the profile up. That information gets repeated to customers in a live chat!
So here’s my advice, log into your Google Business Profile and read your description, service list, and hours like you're seeing them for the first time. Because an AI soon will be. Then check whether a Messages tab is active on your profile. If it's live and you're not monitoring it, you have an employee answering your customers and nobody's supervising them.
YOUR COMPETITORS ARE ASLEEP
88% are using AI like a search engine. The 12% are building systems.
Notion surveyed 6,118 professionals and published the results last week. The finding: 88% of companies are using AI at Level 1 or Level 2, meaning they're prompting individual tools to draft, brainstorm, or assist. Twelve percent have reached Level 3 or 4, where AI is integrated into workflows and, at the highest level, running complex processes end-to-end.
The specific numbers: 57% at Level 1 (AI as a thought partner). 31% at Level 2 (AI as an assistant). 10% at Level 3 (AI as a teammate). 2% at Level 4 (AI running the system).
That 88% number is the competitive gap. Most businesses treating AI like a smarter Google are in the same category as a business that got a calculator in 1985 and called it a technology upgrade.
What Level 3 actually looks like for a local business: a landscaping company has a prompt that marries CRM lead source data with sales project data to generate a weekly view that tells the business “are we on pace or not” and “if we continue at this rate, we finish the year at $x”. It's a repeatable process built around AI so you do it the same way every time.
The summer slowdown is the right time to build. Pick a task you do repeatedly. Write the prompt once. That's how you leave the 88%.
WHAT’S THE PROMPT
Does AI Name Your Business? Find out in 60 seconds.
This week's prompt is about your Google Business Profile. Before you can clean it up for the AI era, you need to know what's actually on it and whether it matches what an AI would say about you.
CITED
Who owns pumpkin spice in Wilmington? ☕🎃
AI says: whoever moves first
PSL season is eight weeks out. I asked three AI engines the same question: "Where can I get a pumpkin spiced latte in Wilmington NC?"
Three engines. Three different answer sets.
Source: Perplexity
Source: ChatGPT
Source: Gemini
Perplexity pulled Maven Coffee, Beginner's Luck, Blue Cup Roastery, Social Coffee, It's Coffee Time, and Vigilant Hope Roasting, citing those shops' own websites directly.
ChatGPT led with Starbucks, then Maroon Monkey, Hidden Grounds, Luna Caffè Roasters, and Social Coffee. Its source wasn't the coffee shops. It was Southern Living.
Gemini named Concorde Espresso Bar, Luna Caffe Roasters, Port City Java, and 24 South Coffee House. Most of its citations came from Arth Real Estate Group's website.
A real estate company is beating local coffee shops in Gemini for a coffee query. That's what an unowned citation looks like!!
Social Coffee is the only local shop that shows up in more than one engine. Not necessarily because they're the best pumpkin latte in town but because they have enough of a digital presence that two engines found them for the same question.
Here's what any of these shops could do right now to own this before September: one page on their website titled something like "Pumpkin Spice Latte in Wilmington NC," written in full sentences about what makes their version worth the drive. House-made syrup. Real ginger. Seasonal timing. The specific things Gemini already cited Luna Caffe for, except pulled from Luna Caffe's own site instead of a real estate blog. Add the same language to the GBP description and services. Let a few reviews mention the phrase naturally.
The citation is sitting there. Nobody's claimed it yet. The shops that move in July own September.
But here’s what you need to know: Every local business has a version of this query. Something seasonal, something specific, something your customers are already asking AI engines right now and getting routed to whoever happened to show up. The question is whether that's you or a real estate blog.
The summer window is real. Your competitors are enjoying it. That's fine. Enjoy yours too. Just spend 20 minutes this week on your Google Business Profile before you do.
See you next Thursday.
- Anna
Want to know where you actually stand in AI search? The AI Visibility Audit tells you exactly what the engines say about your business and what to fix. topofsearchmarketing.com/audit/
THE POLL
